Hey what's up it's Jerad with Ditch Auto and these are the top five settings that
I changed immediately after getting my a 7r3
and I've even made a few little refinements to these settings there are
settings that I've always changed and I've made this video in the past for
other cameras of mine and this as the cameras continue to change and they add
new features and change the way some features work it's changed the settings
that I changed when I initially get the camera some of them are very
consistently the same and so I wanted to talk about what those are and some of
the new settings that I've adjusted on the a7 r3 to just make it a good fit for
me now these are settings that I find work best for my shooting style and for
the way that my mind works in the way I've trained kind of my my muscle memory
and my hands and whatnot when I'm shooting these are just the best
features for me it's not gonna be perfect for everybody but if you are
relatively new to photography or new to using these cameras you might give these
settings to try and see if they work for you so the first thing that I do is
change the focus area the focus area is is basically you can get to it by
hitting the function key going over to focus area sometimes some of these
custom buttons will be configured to and where people will configure their custom
buttons to them but by default they're not but you tap on the function key and
then go to focus area now by default your camera might be in focus area wide
or zone basically what Y does is it uses a large portion of your sensor to grab
focus or to look for focus and so it's looking for things that would be in that
area now for me I have always struggled with making sure that the right thing is
in focus and when I shoot a lot of weddings or events there might be a lot
of people in the scene or a lot of different things going on
and I want to make sure the camera doesn't make a mistake because it's not
very often that I'm shooting something where I have multiple tries like I may
be shooting a wedding and I'm trying to get a shot of the bride and groom kiss
and I don't want the camera to accidentally focus on their officiant to
their pastor that's behind them I want the focus on them and with face
detection and some of those other things that these cameras have it may
accidentally go and focus on something else when I'm shooting an event I may be
shooting a crowd shot and I'm really focused on one person who keeps having
maybe a nice smile and I want that shot of that person but there's so many other
faces in the scene that the camera ends up choosing another face and then that
person's out of focus so even though face detection and all that stuff has
gotten really good and in this camera face detection is actually amazing
sometimes it can mess you up and so I switch my focus settings to the focus
area and then the flexible spot and I can choose large medium or small in and
this and what's nice about that is that if I'm shooting a face and I'm more
close-up I may choose for a focus area small or if I'm shooting something a bit
further away that's bigger and I want to make sure that I'm I have more room for
movement I may use the focus area or the focus spot large but most of the time
I'm in medium it's like a good all-around size and you can see the you
could see the little square right here and I can actually tap around on the
screen and move this focus point around or I can use the multi select tool the
little joystick to kind of move it around as well now one of the things
that I have done is well I'm actually going to talk about that a little bit
later um but anyways by default your camera if you press this down it will
actually recenter that into the middle so even if it's way off over here you
press it down it centers it I don't really like that I'm going to talk about
why I changed that a little bit later so number two is back button focus now by
default when we press the shutters down a little bit on our camera it will start
to focus it basically turns on auto focus and as long as you have this
pressed down a little bit your camera is Auto focusing and
when you let off it should stop autofocusing now the problem with that
is that like I talked about in the last point I'm often shooting things that I'm
waiting for a moment or something like that that might happen really fast so I
have my finger on the shutter ready to go I'm not pressing down and taking
pictures but I have my finger down on the shutter or ready on the shutter now
I don't want focus to start happening there I want the camera to do nothing I
want this shutter button to essentially do one thing which is to take pictures
now considering we have this AF on button back here we can use this button
for autofocus so we can disable auto focus on the shutter so the shutter does
no form of auto focusing and we can use the AF on button on the back so when I'm
shooting I have my index finger on the shutter and I have my thumb right by the
AF on button and I put the camera up to my face I have of course have my focus
point selected properly and I push that autofocus button down and as soon as it
turns green letting me know that I pulled focus I could actually let my
finger off of that button and then just be ready to shoot now if I'm doing
something where I'm following action or following movement I just hold that AF
on button down the entire time and by holding that AF on button down it keeps
autofocus going and and as I'm moving around it's adjusting autofocus and
reconfiguring that for me which is great and it's really fast at doing that so
using that button on the back definitely helps me out because I'm not
accidentally going and losing my autofocus because sometimes it searches
and I don't like it going and doing that search when I'm trying to get an actual
shot now some Sony lenses have AF lock on the side of the lenses which is great
because I can essentially you know even if I have autofocus going I could pull
autofocus I can hold down on that button and then I can tap the shutter button
all I want and it's not going to autofocus
because I have that AF lock on but not all Sony lenses have that and for
example on the 85 millimeter gee master if I'm shooting
in portrait mode that's all the way down here it's not it's not easy I can't like
what am I gonna push it with the palm of my hands like it's not easy to get to
that button so I don't necessarily like to rely on that button I like to just
disable auto focus from naturally happening when I touch the shutter
button so in order to do that we're gonna go into our menu and we're on the
first panel so on the first panel here of options we're going to move over to
our auto focus and then we get to AF with shutter which is down here below
and so AF with shutter we want set to off because that means that auto focus
with shutter is not going to happen and your only way of auto focusing then is
gonna be with the AF on button which is exactly what I want now there is another
option called pre AF which by default on this camera set to off pre AF
essentially lets the camera do its own searching so if I have pre AF on just
it's basically like continual auto focus like the camera I'm not touching
anything right now and it is auto focusing after a little bit of time so I
don't want it to do that obviously that's just as bad as having the the
shutter button pre AF when I press that down I just want AF on back button
autofocus is how I get sharp focus and I get what I want in focus every single
time because I'm taking a little bit of the guesswork away from the camera and
allowing myself to take control over that so image preview is another thing
that comes turned off by default now I with when I was shooting DSLRs and
I talked about this in other videos you know you go and take a shot and you look
at the camera to see if you got the shot you go take
another shot and then you look at the back of the camera now on Sony cameras
you don't have to do that because you have your EVF right here this is
essentially like looking at the back of the screen so when you take a photo you
can see an image preview of that photo here and unless I'm out shooting just
kind of running and gunning and I don't have time to preview my images I want an
image you I want to at least be able to see if
I got the shot so turning on image playback or image preview means that
after I take a photo so I'm going to take a photo and then I get that image
preview here for two seconds I have it enabled to give me that preview for two
seconds now it's gonna do that in the EVF as
well which is exactly where I want it that means that I could be shooting so
I'm shooting photos and I can see my preview in the eyepiece here which means
I don't have to do that chimpón that looking at the back of the screen you
know throwing my neck out and my shoulders because I keep going back and
forth to the camera I can keep my eye up on the camera and I can see all of my
images that I'm shooting here now if I shoot a range of images like right now I
have it in continuous shot so if I shoot continuously so go ahead and pull focus
it's only giving me the preview or the playback of the last image that it
captured which means that if I'm shooting and continuous I'm trying to
follow my action I'm able to follow my action because the blackout is very
minimal when you're shooting the shutter closing and opening is very minimal and
I'm not really missing anything so even if I go into high continuous shooting
high plus mode so I'm going to go ahead and do that in full focus it's almost no
blackout at all in high and high plus continuous shooting so that's definitely
really nice and then of course right now it's writing all those photos but having
that image playback is important to me because I need to see if I got the shot
really quickly and be able to continue on taking more photos that's important
when I'm shooting a wedding or something like that so in order to get an image
playback you need to go into menu go to the second panel there so the second
panel and the seventh which is a display auto review and go down to auto review
and turn that on to two seconds so let me get back to that I made a little
mistake there auto review - and turn it on - two seconds right
it's currently set to OFF when I went when I got the camera out of the box so
setting it to two seconds gives you that that playback I think that that's
extremely important just so that you can check your shots and make sure that you
got your shots now the fourth thing that I kind of alluded to at the very
beginning is changing what happens when I hit the center button on the multi
select now by default your multi select when you press it in is actually going
to is going to Center now there's two different ways and I've done this two
different ways before I I with my a 9 you can set it so that when you press
down on the center it takes you to your focus area so I could switch between the
the flexible spot size to me I find that most useful but a lot of times it's not
any harder than just using your custom to button which by default comes to the
same thing so to me I just I don't I don't want to have to feel around for
other buttons I'm often changing my flexible spot size and so by remapping
the center button so that I can just quickly go back and forth between those
two without having to fumble around for any other buttons is important to me I'm
not often needing to recenter focus my focus point into the center of the
screen and if I really wanted to I can remap that to like the trashcan button
or something like that which by default is set to turning a touch operation on
and off so you can remap your buttons around a little bit in order to achieve
what you're looking for to do that we're gonna go back into our menu and we're on
the second pane still and we're gonna go to custom key to the second of that
multi select custom button and change that to focus area by changing that to
focus area it's now going to allow me to change my focus area really easily
without fumbling around for other buttons so number five is something that
I change on every single Sony camera that I have and that's the function of
ISO with the control wheel so by default you have to tap on the right side of
your control wheel to get into ISO and it takes you into this ISO menu
essentially where you can control ISO now
I don't like that because I like the fact that there is a wheel up here for
aperture there's a wheel back here for your shutter speed and the wheel back
here should be for ISO because a lot of times I have my shutter speed kind of
set you know maybe I'm at like one two hundredths or one 250th of a second and
I'm doing most of the changes to my exposure by using my aperture and my ISO
with these cameras being so good in lower light situations you can use the
ISO for a lot more than you used to be able to so I don't want to have to press
to the side to get to my ISO I think that that's you know a pain in the butt
to have to do that changing your ISO should be much faster than that and you
should be able to do it without having to even you know position your thumb and
a way to where it's tapping on the right side of the control wheel so go into
menu we're still in that custom operation section and I can go into
custom key and control wheel is the first one and I just simply change it to
ISO and I think by default it isn't even set to anything and so if you set it to
ISO now when I adjust my ISO notice my ISO number is changing right here and I
don't go into another menu and lose sight of what I have going on even when
I'm looking through the viewfinder here and I'm changing my ISO it's allowing me
to see everything nothing's moving nothing's changing I could just see
nicely I don't have to go into that that ISO menu anymore so with that said those
are the five things that I change there's a lot of other things that I
change in the camera like I shoot raw plus JPEG all the time it's just a habit
there are other little settings that I change but they're really not too
terribly important these are the ones that I find provide the most value for
me in using this camera so let me know what you think I know it's a little
long-winded in this video as I am with a lot of them so I apologize to those of
you that get frustrated by that but thanks so much for sticking it out if
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